March 28, 2006

• A brain capable of emergent self reference is the product of natural selection. " God " emerges from the mind that organ produces.
• I'm a bad atheist. Sometimes I wish that there was a God, just so I could see the looks on all the other atheists' faces. Fortunately, as Sartre said, "Atheism means never having to say penance." Man, did Ali McGraw ever suck as Simone De Beauvoir.
• i'm reminded of voltaire: Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer. this research is interesting, and i'm glad that at least some researchers are not cowed by the theists. however, i'm not certain that the nearly universal human tendency to believe in gods noted in the article (a) really exists, and (b) if it exists, provides enough common ground for worthwhile investigation. if i believe the sun and moon are combatitive dragons who fight and gain advantage over one another alternately over the course of 24 hours, is this theism? or do i have to assign human characteristics to my being in order for it to be a god?
• Evolution has endowed us with intelligence and curiosity: those traits have a tendency to lead to religion, and also science. I don't really see that any stronger explanation is called for. But what if we did have a strong, "programmed" tendency to believe in God, etc? That wouldn't provide any evidence that such beliefs are also wrong - in fact it might suggest they are true, and that's the main reason why they have a positive survival value.
• Here's a clue -- He be called God the Father. Seriously, Freud was all over this +100 years ago, and he was exactly right.
• Heavenly Father ! Heavenly Father !
• I was strongly programmed to believe in god (= raised catholic) and I am a satin-worshipping heathen devil atheist, and happily so :) does this mean I have some sort of mutation?
• I think Cardenio hits the nail on the head. Because of the fact that we evolved referential, creative, intuitive, and abstract thought, our ancestors, who had to use every shred of cleverness they had to survive, made a lot of good and un-obvious correct connections that greatly improved their survival. The downside is they made a lot of bad non-obvious wrong connections as well. The first type we call technologies and good practices (knowing that pork must be cooked more thoroughly than beef and whatnot), and the second type we call superstitions and religions.
• A mind advanced enough to have an imagination will believe all kinds of things: God, afterlife, reincarnation, ghosts, fairies, intelligent life on other planets...the list is endless.
• Yeah, but what does God believe in?
• Woah. *stares at hands, fascinated*
• God believes in baseball, apple pie, all that stuff. Where you been?
• rats musta missed that episode.
• Airs every time da Preznit goes on the TV.
• “A brain capable of emergent self reference is the product of natural selection. "God " emerges from the mind that organ produces.” Wow cardenio - that’s one of the best explainations I’ve ever heard...er...read. ...mind if I steal it? I keep having trouble explaining my pov on this. I also like the description from the article: "God is a way of thinking that was rendered permanent by natural selection." Man I keep trying to say stuff like that (to atheists and religious people) and it seems to get translated: “Your mother wears army boots, jerko!” I think even if we grant “God” a real concrete existance, it makes the same difference to us on the ground as if it’s only a way of thinking. Bjorklund and Bering seem to be looking at the “story” element there too. At least as far as the children go. I wonder if we will ever get or need a surrogate for that? Or if we have one now? The state maybe. Nationalism seems big among the same folks who are religious though. So maybe it’s the same sort of folks?
• I find that meme theory explains God a lot more thoroughly than any emergent behavior of complex thinking systems. Do dolphins believe in God? Chimpanzees? Honeybees? We only have one example of a species that developed a belief in God out of the thousands that occupy the planet. Drawing any conclusions along the lines of evolution is driving towards a belief in god are built on a house of cards. The relevant issues for humans are, first, humanity evolved an unquestioning trust in elders who were the repository of knowledge in tribal societies. If you didn't listen to them, you'ld get eaten by wolves. Humans don't really have any natural defenses other than their social structure and its accumulated libraries of tactics and tool construction. If you went to check to see if the wolves in the forest were real, you'ld also get eaten, so all the people who distrusted authority were at a disadvantage, and because the people who did trust authority would follow orders, kill them, take their land and destroy their reproductive potential. Secondly, belief in god(s) offered a selective advantage to its early adopters, since they set about killing people who didn't believe and acquired a nice internal social structure revolving around unquestioning obediance to a set of laws. Since there is this wonderful hole in the human belief firewall, the acceptance of beliefs without evidence at early ages, and in many people it never closes, you now have a self replicating, infectious virus that has certain selective advantages among highly infected populations, and very little in the way of a vaccine. The fact that 2000 years after we did away with whole pantheons of gods by replacing them with an even more rediculous god (omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient ... who commits atrocities while pretending to love us), we still offer unquestioning obediance to ideas that we are given in childhood, gives some idea of how gigantic this hole in our firewall is. To be honest, given our environment, an uncaring, pernicious god makes a whole lot more sense. But that meme will not take root. If humanity hadn't been gregarious, there would be no advantage to believing in god. If humanity hadn't developed tools and structured societies, no god virus could have taken hold. If humans were capable of defending themselves from birth, were apex predators to begin with instead of scared little omnivores, the hole in the firewall would never have had an advantage.
• In conclusion, the Kzinti probably don't believe in anything without seeing it, the Klingons shouldn't have gods either, and the borg don't need any. On the other hand, the Betazoid probably have the more pernicious god belief you've ever seen, considering the ease with which it would spread amongst an empathic, telepathic, agrarian population.
• Could well be Mord. I’m just (usually) thinking about the kind of knowlege it is rather than where it comes from. I suppose if you say any thinking system of a complexity beyond a certain point will develop entirely reason based concepts (not necessarially God) it’d be more accurate. “God” - or rather GodCo; the belief in God - does seem to have that psychological component of relieving guilt as well as base needs. So you kill some guy, but he’s not a believer, so you can dehumanize him. But also you can sacrifice - that is - give a starving guy a sandwich, without the R-complex part of you screaming at you for giving away food. Of course, there are principles which one can live by to do that as well. Perhaps our caveman ancestors needed a ham-fisted explaination? “Look, God wants you to give the guy some food, ok?” Just speculation.
• Mord: There is no evidence that other species don't believe in God. Your conclusion that they don't is baseless. Secondly, known cases of people killing other people because they have different beliefs are too recent to have any evolutionary effect. The pantheons of gods replaced by a single god is only a Western European phenomenon. Some modern cultures still have multiple gods.
• No, there is no evidence. Find evidence of it, and you can postulate about directed evolution.
• And it's spelled "ridiculous". (Sorry, one of my pet peeves.) To the article. It was interesting, but the theory negates itself nicely in the end by saying "humans can't believe the theory that they're hardwired not to believe there's no god because they're hardwired to believe there is a god, but trust me, it proves there's no god" misses the mark. As plegmund pointed out, the theory that we're hardwired to believe in a god doesn't prove or disprove the existence of a god. They're two totally different lines of reasoning.
• It has to do with probabilities. You have 1 positive test out of thousands of unknown results. Show another few hundred positives and you can talk about trends. My statement has nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of the remaining tests, it has to do with hypothesizing about causes when you don't know jack.
• And there are plenty of examples of paleo-societies killing the out-group. Being the in-group certainly had survival advantages. I'm not talking about religious wars. I'm talking about not listening to the elders.
• God! Smite her!! . . . . . . . . . heee's a-cookin' a-somethin' up! /Family_guy
• Lara: Can you prove or disprove the existence of something that can't be measured? And if you could measure it, wouldn't it then not be a "god" and instead be part of nature since it is now observable and finite? Its the old question about the supernatural. Once its explained, its not super anymore.
• Oh, and Lara, you are absolutely right. Just showing that we have a baseless belief, says nothing about the truth or falsehood of the belief. It just says we don't know.
• Did God create Man in his image, as written in the Bible? It seems to me that all evidence points to the opposite being the case, i.e. Man created God in his own image for the purpose of having a crutch to lean on in hard times and when in dire straits. If "God" actually did create Man in his image, he did a remarkably lousy job!
• “Can you prove or disprove the existence of something that can't be measured?” Probably my favorite question. Can you prove the existance of logic? (purely philosophical question. Not implying anything about ‘God’ here - just how we think about stuff) “...And if you could measure it, wouldn't it then not be a "god" and instead be part of nature since it is now observable and finite?” Mord, I am so on board with that statement, man. From the article: “It doesn't say that there is a god or there isn't a god or that there's any one particular type of god — merely that children develop these ways of seeing the world.” Seems like that’s always been the problem - when people’s visions and ways of seeing the world are at odds. “If "God" actually did create Man in his image, he did a remarkably lousy job!” Well, greybeard, it must have been his trick knee. Also, God must be drinking too much beer, ‘cause I’m getting a pot belly. God should really lay off the snacks too.
• Deities are just anthropomorphed causality. Or you might say humans tend to conflate causality and intentionality. Easy mistake to make in an unfamiliar universe...
• I take your point on the measurement of "ideas" but in the same sprit. I can create a distance metric that operates on languages, so, can I measure logic? or logics? Yes. I can also create a measure on god beliefs. But I can't create a measure on gods themselves, since nobody has rigorously defined what one is.
• And yes, such a measure would be dependent on logic operating, but then so does your question. Otherwise I could answer it with "HAM!"
• Turn to novels Jamesa Michener describes the syndrome well!
• "...can I measure logic? or logics? Yes...But I can't create a measure on gods themselves, since nobody has rigorously defined what one is." First decent answer I've gotten on that topic, Mord. I agree. My thing has always been that the question itself, the issue, is tautology. I'd add that it is impossible to rigorously define God under certain definitions.The one I prefer - the "everything" definition (since it's all-inclusive) falls prey to your earlier point on observability. So, even given the broadest possible definition, you can't measure it anyway. Any lesser definition, I think, just spirals off into goofyness.
• God is one of those things that everybody thinks they know what the other guy is talking about, but when you try to pin them down on specifics its impossible. Two people can have a seemingly rational conversation about God, and then you realize that they are talking about two completely different meanings. This is basically what I think, and I'll preface this with the fact that I'm not a good student of philosophy or epistemology: If you were to rigorously define what God is and isn't, I could empirically prove (or fail to prove) the existence of such within the boundaries of your definition. I suppose this is why God is always defined vaguely, outside the bounds of inspection, in order to avoid the uncomfortable situation for the believer. If God is there, as you say he is, why is he absent every time we go to look? He doesn't seem to mesh with your definition. If God interacts with the universe, we should be able to measure that interaction, and I need to worry about going to Hell (well, if he's a petty vindictive sort of God) If God doesn't interact with the universe (on time scales of human history), then everyone should be agnostic on his existence, because nobody can have OR HAS EVER HAD any access to knowledge about him. Then there is the case, God once interacted in human history, but won't interact now, in which case I have to ask, why is He so fickle? In that case, for all we know, God back then could have died, or not really been God at all, in which case we're agnostic again. He might be real now, or not, but there is no way to know. I mean look, to me, most faith is right up there with belief in the easter bunny. If the true believers really believed what they say they do, as in, the physical reality of a God that is going to judge them based on the way they live their lives (the same way they believe the physical reality of a truck thats going to run them over), there would be a lot more virtuous people in the world. As it is, I can probably count the number that actually believe with that sort of conviction about the nature of reality on one hand.
• faith of a mustard seed? Well waxed, Mord.
• Interesting that as more study and discovery emerges about the structure and "hard wiring" of the brain, elements such as a hardwired propensity for "..nearly universal human tendency to believe in gods is a kind of programming that resulted from natural selection." emerge. Recent MRI (and other) brain scans of those who have Schizophrenia can explain the mechanism of hallucinations. "Using a new image analysis method that detects very fine changes in the brain, the scientists detected gray matter loss of more than 10 percent first in the parietal, or outer, regions of the brain; this loss spread to engulf the rest of the brain over five years. Patients with the worst brain tissue loss also had the worst symptoms, which included hallucinations, delusions, bizarre and psychotic thoughts, hearing voices, and depression. Schizophrenia affects an estimated 1 percent of Americans. Its causes are unknown, and the disease typically hits without warning in the late teens or 20s. As these experiences are so "real" to the sufferer, one might link recent discovery to religious 'experience' of the past. (St.Paul .. aka: Saul of Tarsus for instance.)
• The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
• mandyman's friend's husband might soon have a case of bicameralism.
• Ah, Julian Jaynes! I see the connection - gods as artefacts of our mental structure - but I think he had a broader and more sympathetic outlook on religion. I think the book makes quite a persuasive case. But at the end of the day, I can't believe that the Iliad, say, was written unconsciously. I should have thought literary composition was a prime example of the sort of thing which requires consciousness.
• Ok, here's my leap of faith with only circumstantial evidence to support it. I find it very hard to believe that consciousness could be a phenomenon that arose less than 3000 years ago. In fact, in order to write the Iliad, one needed to have insight into other people's motivations that I think you can only get when you are capable of viewing yourself from a hypothetical external vantage point. Otherwise the Iliad would have been a wish fulfillment book about Superman going in and sleeping with Helen of Troy. The conflict would have been superficial. Did some people really think the voices in their head were coming from somewhere/something else? Maybe. But a genetic change in brain structure resulting in bicameralism ought to still be floating around out there in the gene pool and available for study unless it was terribly detrimental or we passed through a bottlenecking event. Were some ancient authors / religious figures schizophrenic? Certainly. Joan of Arc comes to mind immediately.